post #70! The Unprocessed Child

Today I finished The Unprocessed Child, by Valerie Fitzenreiter. 241 pages.

As some of you will remember, this book was recommended on this very blog, so I immediately bought it, being quite interested in the subject. It's one woman's account of raising her daughter without schooling her at all. She didn't homeschool; she simply did not force any kind of curriculum or education, whatsoever, onto her child. Overall, I'm glad that I read it. It helped me think about childhood and schooling in ways I really hadn't thought about before.

Here is one really key quote: "The true aim of school seems to be conformity rather than learning." Yep, so true. She talks about how schooling coerces and manipulates and bullies children into "learning" things that they don't care about, thus ensuring that children associate learning with boredom, fear, and manipulation. Fitzenreiter believes that children are naturally curious and intelligent, and will learn whatever they need to learn, when they want and need to learn it. If you allow them to do whatever they want, they will investigate the world, they'll play and use their imaginations and experience lots of joy and peace in childhood. She uses her own daughter as an example of the truth of this theory. (Her daughter went straight from 18 years of being unschooled into college, where she earned a 4.0.)

She addresses many issues that may arise when parenting a child this way. She talks about bedtimes (they didn't have any set bedtime; her daughter simply went to sleep when she was tired, thus learning to listen to her body and natural rhythms); about discipline (there were very few rules, and certainly no discipline); about emotions, friendship, honesty, sexuality, and socialization, among a whole host of other issues. Overall, I found myself agreeing with her, and being amazed that more people haven't thought of this sort of thing earlier. It's clear that children and parents are both miserable with the way things are, but no one realizes that things truly could be different.

But, I just can't give this book a 100% favorable review. For one thing, after a couple chapters she really really starts to sound quite self-righteous. By the end of the book, I was quite turned-off by her better-parent-than-thou attitude. Parents don't want to be berated or belittled any more than children do. I think that the vast majority of parents are doing their absolute best to raise their children, and maybe they're not doing the best that could be done, but they are doing their individual best, and they need encouragement and praise for their efforts if nothing else.

Another thing that really rubbed me the wrong way was that she built up her opponents (school teachers for example) totally as strawpeople, and then burned them to the ground. Her assessment of the folks she disagreed with was totally unfair, and often inarticulate. This is truly unfortunate because she had some legitimate criticisms, but they were unsophisticated and just came off sounding uninformed. In general, in fact, she had done almost no research, and it sounded like she was basing her entire argument on her single experience with her single child. I really felt like she'd have convinced her readership SO much more if she'd have just told her story, in memoir-form perhaps, instead of preaching and haranguing. Because she was basing her argument for unschooling just on her own experience, she didn't seem to really take into account single-parent families, or impoverished families, or any number of other circumstances that I myself haven't thought of. Again, this is unfortunate because I'm sure that there are important and sophisticated arguments to be made for unschooling, that can work across the whole spectrum of cultures and socio-economic situations.

Overall what I would say is: investigate unschooling. It's an incredibly important idea. But read this book with a pinch of salt. Or whatever the expression is.

Peace! ~Tamie